Van Loon's Lives

Its full title, deliberately written in a manner already archaic at the time of writing, is Van Loon's Lives: Being a true and faithful account of a number of highly interesting meetings with certain historical personages, from Confucius and Plato to Voltaire and Thomas Jefferson, about whom we had always felt a great deal of curiosity and who came to us as dinner guests in a bygone year.

[1] Loosely based on the classical Plutarch's Lives, it recounts the biographies of various famous historical characters, and like Plutarch often pairing together characters from different times and places whose life, careers or personalities seemed to Van Loon to bear a similarity to each other (e.g. William the Silent and George Washington who led the Wars of Independence of their respective countries; the philosophers Descartes and Emerson; Empress Theodora of Byzantium and Queen Elizabeth I of England; Torquemada and Robespierre, of both of whom Van Loon had less than a flattering view...).

In the book the author imagines he is living in his summer home in the town of Veere on the island of Walcheren in the Dutch province of Zealand.

The summoning is done in the prosaic way of leaving under a specific stone a note with the names of the persons they wish to meet that weekend, who duly make their appearance.

A local policeman locks them up in separate cells, but by the next morning they had mysteriously disappeared...) The book was written at the time when Veere, like the rest of the Netherlands, lay under Nazi occupation.